Hastings Harrison lived in Beaumont for just six years, from 1924 to 1930, but the lasting mark he made won him an honorary lifetime citizen designation in 1959, which he proudly kept throughout the rest of his long life.

Harrison was 90 when he died in 1985, but it was his service as general secretary of the Beaumont YMCA that won him lifelong friends here, whom he would later eulogize at their funerals though he had long since moved out of the area.

Acheson quoted "another witness" in his account of Harrison's impact on Beaumont.

"I saw Harrison single-handedly face a strife-torn community beginning with a powerful and persuasive speech he made to the Rotary Club of Beaumont. The community was ready to erupt into armed conflict because of the Klan differences. By raw courage, heartfelt convictions and decisive action, he led the community back to sanity," Acheson reported.

Who was Harrison? Where did he come from? Where did he go after six years here?

Andrew Hastings Harrison was born on Nov. 20, 1894, in Leonard, Texas, in Fannin County. He was a veteran of World War I, married Fay Farmer of Dawson, Texas, in 1919, and began his working career in Corsicana as the general secretary of the YMCA, moving to Beaumont in 1924 and then on to Tulsa, Okla., in 1930.

A Beaumont Journal piece about Harrison's achievements recounted his efforts to reunite the "broken citizenship" of Beaumont, which had been "rent asunder" by the Ku Klux Klan.

"Bitterness was everywhere. It had encroached upon the brotherhood of the fraternal lodges, in the civic clubs and in the churches. While the fight lasted, almost every man in the city was tagged as a Klansman or anti-Klansman. There was hardly a middle road to take."

Dean Tevis, a writer for The Enterprise, said in a story published in the Tulsa World that Harrison "mentioned neither Klan nor anti-Klan. He made men feel ashamed of themselves. He scourged provincialism, partisanship and bigotry and the result was like a Methodist revival.

After his 25-minute Rotary Club speech, the audience was in a furor, Tevis wrote.

"He had done what no man had been able to do. Men threw their arms around each other and vowed friendship. Bitterness began to disappear and soon was gone. When Hastings moved to Tulsa, Beaumont lost not only one of its most useful citizens, but one of its most interesting men - a man who established friendships where there had been bitter enmity."

A Dallas newspaper, date not included on the clipping, published an article quoting an editorial in the Beaumont Journal with the headline: "To a Dynamo."

The editorial recounted a recent visit by Harrison to Beaumont so he could meet with "Arthur H. Compton, famous physicist, brought here to speak under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews."

The conference was another of Harrison's passions. In 1939, on temporary leave from the Tulsa YMCA, he went to Dallas to create the third regional office of the conference, which already had been organized in New York and Chicago.

"Mr. Harrison is a transplanted Beaumonter in Dallas because of his activities in the NCCJ," The Journal wrote. "Sooner or later, he will return to carry out the provisions of the will of his great friend, Bismark A. Steinhagen."

The account described Harrison as "red-headed, dynamic, aggressive. Hastings Harrison is a vital contradiction to the general conception of those who work for the good of the soul. He is about as passive as a Geiger counter in Bikini."

That reference at least helps to provide the era in which the Journal was writing. It is post-World War II. B.A. Steinhagen had died in 1946 and the United States was conducting atomic weapons tests at Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

In a letter to Harrison from Steinhagen dated May 12, 1943, on the letterhead of Comet Rice Mills, the company Steinhagen led as president, he praised Harrison's skills as an orator.

Steinhagen gently chided the "Exchange Club boys" who had asked Harrison to appear in Beaumont for a talk and let him get away without paying his expenses.

"Anyway, I can afford to do it, I want to do it, and I'm going to do it. I am enclosing herewith a check for $50 which I hope you will use to buy a medium priced suit of clothes. They tell me that good suits cost about $100 now," Steinhagen wrote.

"I want to again tell how much I appreciated you coming down here on this occasion. Everybody says it was the best talk they ever heard you make," Steinhagen said.

Harrison led the Dallas office of the National Conference of Christians and Jews from 1939 until his retirement in 1959, when he was already national vice president of the organization. Then he began his third career as senior consultant to the president of Southern Methodist University, helping to complete the university's Fine Arts Center of which a significant unit - the Hastings Harrison Instrumental and Choral Halls - was named for him.

In a letter dated June 8, 1964, written in his own hand, Harrison told the letter's recipient - apparently Bob Hope, a major donor to SMU - that "I have loved the people in all of the places in which I have lived, but that Beaumonters will always be first in my affections."